Michael David Elliot was serving life in prison for four murders in 1993. / Michigan Department of Corrections via AP

by Gary Strauss and Michael Winter, USA TODAY

by Gary Strauss and Michael Winter, USA TODAY

A murderer who escaped a Michigan prison Sunday night and carjacked a woman was captured Monday evening in northern Indiana, the LaPorte County Sheriff's Department reported.

Michael Elliot, who was serving life sentences for four 1993 murders, was apprehended after a short chase near Shipshewana, where the unidentified woman's 2004 Jeep Liberty was found earlier in the day, WZZM-TV reported. She called 911 from a concealed cellphone, then ran into a restroom and locked herself inside.

Elliot, 40, escaped the Ionia Correctional Facility about 7 p.m. Sunday by using a box cutter and a hammer to make holes in two electrified, 12-foot-high perimeter fences. He evaded motion detectors, security cameras and gun towers as he crawled away. Prison officials said he was dressed in a white kitchen uniform, which may have camouflaged him in the snow.

"He was not zapped with electricity, and he was not picked up by the motion sensors," prison spokesman Ross Marlan said.

Elliot was not discovered missing for two hours.

He walked three miles to Ionia, where he abducted the woman and drove to Indiana. While Elliott pumped gas at a store near Middlebury, in Elkhart County, the woman called police on a concealed cellphone and then hid in the restroom until police arrived. She told officers Elliot said he wanted to flee as far as he could from the prison, about 100 miles north.

Earlier, Nashville police were warned that Elliot could be headed to the area because he has family there, an emergency dispatcher told The Tennessean in Nashville.

Elliot was serving five life sentences for armed robbery and killing four people in an August 1993 home invasion in Bentley Township, Mich.